Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian Surreptitious symbiosis: engagement between activists and NGO's Article (Accepted version) (Refereed)

Original citation: Glasius, Marlies and Ishkanian, Armine (2014) Surreptitious symbiosis: engagement between activists and NGO's. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. ISSN 0957-8765 (In Press) © 2014 Springer This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60128/ Available in LSE Research Online: November 2014 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.

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Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement between activists and NGOs

By Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian

(Forthcoming) Accepted for publication in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations

ABSTRACT Based on research conducted in Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan the article analyses the relationship between activists engaged in street protests or direct action since 2011 and NGOs. It examines how activists relate to NGOs and whether it is possible to do sustained activism to bring about social change without becoming part of a ‘civil society industry’. The article argues that while at first glance NGOs seem disconnected from recent street activism, and activists distance themselves from NGOs, the situation is more complicated than meets the eye. It contends that the boundaries between the formal NGOs and informal groups of activists is blurred and there is much cross-over and collaboration. The article demonstrates and seeks to explain this phenomenon, which we call surreptitious symbiosis, from the micro- perspective of individual activists and NGO staff. Finally, we discuss whether this surreptitious symbiosis can be sustained and sketch three scenarios for the future.

Key words: NGOs, activism, global civil society, street

protests, Occupy

1. INTRODUCTION The emergence in 2011 of the pro-democracy movements of the Arab Spring and the anti-

austerity and anti-capitalist movements captured the public’s imagination the world over.

Journalists and media commentators covering these movements began to ask ‘who are these

people?’ What do they want and why are these movements suddenly “kicking off

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everywhere”’? (Mason, 2012). Academics sought to examine the demands and aspirations of

the protestors (Calhoun, 2013, Graeber, 2013, Kaldor and Selchow, 2012), their links to and

differences from previous movements (Biekart and Fowler, 2013, Tejerina et al., 2013), and

the ways in which they were using new forms of communication to organize and mobilize

(Castells, 2012).

We conducted research in Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan in April-August 2013. Our aim was to build on and expand the existing research on these new movements, by not only including new sites (e.g., London, Yerevan) that had thus far been overlooked by other

scholars, but to also consider the relationship of the activists with more formal civil society

actors including non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions, and political parties.

In this article we analyse the relationship between the new activists and the archetypical

institutionalized actors of global civil society, the NGOs. We examine the following

questions: how do today’s activists relate to NGOs? And is it possible to do sustained

activism to bring about social change without becoming part of a ‘civil society industry’,

with fundraising structures and engagement with government?

We will show that, while at first glance NGOs seem disconnected from recent street

activism, this assessment is only partially correct and the situation is more complicated.

While NGOs did not initiate the demonstrations or play an active role in square occupations,

there was NGO involvement behind the scenes, through the provision of non-monetary

resources and the participation of individual NGO employees in their personal capacity. Thus

the boundaries between the formal NGOs and informal groups of activists is blurred and there

is much more cross-over and collaboration than meets the eye. In this article, we demonstrate

and seek to explain this phenomenon, which we call surreptitious symbiosis.

We locate our argument within the context of transformations within the sphere of

global civil society, to which both NGOs and activists belong. Global civil society was

defined by Anheier et al. as “the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks

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and individuals located between the family, the state and the market and operating beyond the

confines of national societies, polities and economies (Anheier et al., 2001, 17). Here, we

emphasize the logic of that sphere, and the tensions to which its interaction with other logics

gives rise. Global civil society primarily relies on an ideational logic, it is animated by ideas

about how the world should be ordered, and the notion that ideas can persuade, and bring

about social change. As such, it sets itself against the material logic of the market and the

coercive logic of the state. But, as Chandhoke has put it, while there is nothing wrong with

subdividing areas of collective life into separate spheres and endowing these domains with

their distinct logics, “[w]hat is problematic is the assumption that appears to underlie

theorising in this mode, namely that these domains of collective action do not influence each

other, or that they do not affect each other, or that they do not constitute in the sense of

shaping each other (Chandhoke, 2002, 35 italics in original). Just as the state and the market

are not free of ideas, civil society is also permeated by material and coercive logics.

Within the sphere of global civil society, we discern (following Kaldor, 2003, and

others) a cyclical movement. At certain points in time, citizen dissatisfaction with the ways in

which state and market have organized social life gives rise to spontaneous outbursts of

collective action. It has been argued, necessarily heavily stylizing and simplifying world

history that 1848, 1968 or 1989 have constituted such moments. We ourselves and others

have argued that 2011 is another such moment (Reifer, 2014, Weyland, 2012). One common

characteristic of the activists at the heart of such moments is that they agitate virulently

against the logics of coercion and materialism, and distance themselves from these logics,

relating the legitimacy of their cause to the purity of the ideational logic.

But when the nature of activism becomes more sustained, its engagement with the

other logics evolves. Over time, activists often come to the view that for ideas to do their

persuasive work, they require a more secure institutional footing, which involves a) material

resources and b) recognition by and a relationship with the state or international governance

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institutions. The NGO-isation of civil society in the 1980s and 1990s has been well

documented (Bebbington et al., 2008, Howell and Pearce, 2001, Lewis, 2010). The

emergence of the various square movements in 2011 drew particular attention to the growing

disconnect between NGOs and informal movements and even from the communities they

claim to support. As we will discuss below, there is a consensus between the literature on

NGOs and the activists we interviewed that NGOs have gone too far in the accommodation

with states and funders. Even CIVICUS, which is an alliance of organisations dedicated to

strengthening “citizen action and civil society throughout the world” has expressed concern

about the “noticeable disconnect” between the new informal movements and established

NGOs, going so far as to recommended that NGOs “must embrace such movements to

connect better with the public and renew themselves in order to survive” (CIVICUS, 2011).

The current moment, we argue, marks the starting point of a new cycle from

spontaneous activism to institutionalization, albeit one which activists insist is distinct from

the NGO model of institutionalization. As one might expect based on the cyclical logic, we

found that activists reviled NGOs for their relationship to power and money, and what

many described as their loss of values and mission. But on closer consideration, the

relationship between activists and NGOs turned out to be a more complex one of what we

term surreptitious symbiosis. Activists rely on NGOs for technical support for things like

meeting space and printing to avoid direct reliance on the material logic of fundraising and

for legal aid and information about government plans to help protect against, and indirectly

engage with, the coercive logic of the state. Individuals involved in activism, as we shall

describe, sometimes work for NGOs and often rely on their expertise. Those who do work

for NGOs often experience them as constraining, and support and participate in protest and

direct action networks to escape these constraints. Finally, as we will show, although

some activists roundly reject and critique the ‘managerialism’ of NGOs, other

activists are already beginning to give their activities a more institutional shape which –

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although they are in denial of this– begins to look like that of NGOs. The activists recognise

that their activities are taking a more institutional shape, but argue that they are creating

alternative spaces as well as new practices and forms of organizing which preserve the

ideational logic.

Based on our research in four very different settings, we will argue that the cyclical

nature of civil society’s engagement with state and market can now be considered as a global

cycle within global civil society, transcending local differences and circumstances. We find

some universal trends in the ways in which highly institutionalized and highly spontaneous

actors interact in order to resolve some of the dilemma’s thrown up by the encounter with

material and coercive logics. We demonstrate and seek to explain the phenomenon of

surreptitious symbiosis between NGOs and activists that we found in all four contexts.

For the purposes of this article we use Edwards’ definition of what an NGO is, and

how it differs from other actors in global civil society: “a subset of civic organisation, defined

by the fact that they are formally registered with government, receive a significant proportion

of their income from voluntary contributions (usually alongside grants from government), and

are governed by a board of trustees rather than the elected representatives of a constituency”

(Edwards, 2000: 7-8). We recognize the great diversity of NGOs, ranging from global

organisations with hundreds of staff and millions of supporters to local organisations, and

encompassing advocacy, service-provision, professional, cultural and other organisations.

Nonetheless, as Edwards’ definition makes clear, NGOs have in common that relative to

other, more informal actors in civil society, they have to a greater extent embraced the

coercive logic (by registering with the state) and the material logic (by structurally soliciting

funding for their activities).

‘Activist’ is an equally slippery term. Dictionary definitions define an activist as

someone who “believes strongly in political or social change and takes part in activities such

as public protests to try to make this happen” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online) or uses

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“vigorous campaigning” (Oxford Dictionaries) to bring about such change. In much of the

social movement literature being an activist is a collective identity linked to participation in a

social movement or collective action (Bobel, 2007, 148). For the purposes of this article, we

operate with a much narrower definition, considering as activists those who have taken part

in sustained street activism (often occupying a square) and/or direct action since 2011. As

will be elaborated below, it is these people that we have focused on in our interviews in

Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan; and their views on and engagement with NGOs are the

main topic of this article.

In the next section, we briefly outline our case selection and methodology. Sections

three – six form the empirical heart of the article: the third section will discuss the criticisms

of NGOs in the academic literature, and the very similar points made by our respondents in

the context of their activism. Section four will discuss how NGOs support activists; section

five will explain why NGOs support activists and how individual respondents described their

relationship to NGOs; and section six will discuss their relation to resources and

institutionalization. Together, they will uncover an intimate but uneasy relationship between

activists and NGOs. The conclusion will address the sustainability of the ‘surreptitious

symbiosis’ between activists and NGOs that we have described.

2. CASE SELECTION AND METHODOLOGY From April –August 2013 we conducted research in Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan.

These four cities had one important commonality: they all witnessed extensive and sustained

mobilization, including street demonstrations and an encampment, in 2011 or early 2012.

Beyond that, we chose these cities for their differences, in terms of the financial and political

context in which civil society operates in each city, and the circumstances that gave rise to

recent street activism.

London can be considered as the site with the most established civil society of the

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four cities where we conducted research. It is the capital of an established liberal democracy

and a global financial centre. In terms of the number of NGOs (over 900,000 civil society

organisations, of which 163,763 are registered charities, Clark et al., 2012: 3-4), their

longevity, and the regulatory framework that governs them, it can be considered as the

context with the most developed NGO landscape, commonly referred to as ‘the voluntary

sector’ (Alcock and Kendall, 2011). In the past 4 – 5 years, the sector has been suffering

from the effects of the global financial crisis and the introduction of austerity policies, losing

funds both from public spending cuts (Kane and Allen, 2011) and from reduced individual

giving (Clark 2012). In comparison to our other sites, what stands out is that the funding

NGOs in London rely on comes from central or local government and/or private donations

(Clark et al., 2012). The Conservative Party, the senior partner in the current coalition

government, came to power in May 2010 promising to strengthen civil society through its

Big Society agenda (Cameron, 2010). Yet there are concerns that the independence of the

voluntary sector is under threat due to the growing focus on contracting and use of gagging

clauses in contracts (Independence Panel, 2013) and widespread criticism from government

officials of campaigning by voluntary organisations (Ishkanian, 2014). In January 2014 a

controversial lobbying bill was narrowly passed, which charities and campaigning groups

across the political spectrum have argued will have a chilling effect on freedom of

expression and campaigning (Last, 2013, 38 Degrees, 2013). London has a long tradition of

large-scale peaceful demonstrations marching through the city center (including a 2 million

march against the war in Iraq in 2003), but also of violent anti-police riots in different parts

of the city, most recently and notably in the Summer of 2011. Occupy London was directly

inspired by Occupy Wall Street and its main message was against global capitalism and

inequality. But it also built on the earlier local repertoires of Reclaim the Streets (since the

1990s) and the grassroots Climate Camps (2006-2011). In terms of its concerns it can be

seen as part of a broader local, national and transnational anti-austerity movement.

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Yerevan, until recently at least, has been typified by what we have elsewhere called a

‘genetically engineered’ (Ishkanian, 2007) civil society. Since the fall of communism 25

years ago, foreign donors together have spent large sums of money strengthening civil

society, as a means of promoting democracy, good governance, human rights, and the rule

of law. Within a few years, donors claimed success in having exponentially grown the

number of NGOs from a few hundred to several thousand in nearly all of the former

socialist countries (US Agency for International Development, 1999). Despite the

investment of human and financial resources, scholars and policy makers continue to

lament the “weakness” of civil society in the former socialist countries (Celichowski,

2004, Mandel, 2012, Morjé Howard, 2003) and

the lack of trust that NGOs have (Caucasus Research Resource Center, 2010, EBRD, 2011,

Evans Jr., 2012). Such skepticism and lack of trust have made it relatively easy for the

Armenian government to justify crackdowns on NGOs by accusing them of being agents in

the pay of foreign governments or 'grant-eaters' shamelessly chasing donor funding

(Ishkanian, 2008/2012). Beginning in 2010, despite the rising authoritarianism, and

sometimes in direct response to it, Armenia has seen the emergence of new grassroots

movements locally known as “civic initiatives”. Civic initiatives are grassroots, volunteer

based, non-partisan groups usually consisting of between twenty and (more rarely) a few

hundred individuals, who come together to address a particular issue and disband once that

issue has been resolved. Civic initiatives are structured horizontally and decision-making

is consensus-based with discussions taking place in person or in secret Facebook groups.

Civic initiatives address a wide range of social issues spanning from mining, transport fee

hikes, pensions’ privatization, to the defense of historical buildings and urban green

spaces. The civic initiative Occupy Mashtots Park, which lasted from February – May

2012, succeeded in saving a public park from being destroyed for the construction of

boutiques. The immediate aim was to save the park, but the larger objective was to

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challenge policies which consistently put the interests of oligarchs and corporations ahead

of people and the environment.

Athens has the most traditional civil society: the church, and until recently party-

affiliated structures, have had an important role in civil society, whilst formal NGOs are a

relatively recent and weak phenomenon. Their “massive appearance” (Tsaliki, 2010, 153)

was very much dependent on decisions taken by the state itself (Afouxenidis et al., 2004:

3) and by international organizations such as the OECD and the EU to promote such forms

of public participation. Even in the 2000s, “large institutionalised civil society

organisations (CSOs) are few and are not influential in Greece. Most formal CSOs do not

attract a significant number of members or a significant amount of funds” (Sotiropoulos

and Karamagioli, 2005, 8). In comparative perspective, we attribute this to Athens being

neither a ‘western’ context with a tradition of formal associationalism (such as London),

nor a ‘non- western’ context that has been the subject of NGO-isation within the

framework of foreign aid (such as Cairo and Yerevan). In the context of the Greek debt

crisis, the role of NGOs appears on the one hand to have increased, particularly in relation

to vulnerable groups such as the unemployed and migrants, but on the other hand the

NGOs themselves are also financially affected by the crisis. Street protests are dated by

activists as beginning before the financial crisis, with the shooting of an unarmed boy by

the police in December 2008.

However, the main protests, seeing hundreds of thousands of people in the street, were a

response to the financial and political crisis relating to public debt. These began in May 2010,

and culminated in the occupation of Syntagma Square from May to early August 2011.

Cairo has in recent years been the most volatile context for civil society. Similar to

Yerevan, NGOs in Cairo have also been the recipients of vast amounts of foreign aid over the

past two decades. The number of NGOs greatly expanded, with foreign funding, in the 1990s,

when they were seen as a means of protecting disadvantaged groups from the worst effects of

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structural adjustment policies (Abdelrahman, 2004, 59). The thriving NGO sector broadly

consisted of Islamist, Coptic, and secular, especially human rights and women’s rights groups,

and became an attractive source of employment for middle class professionals, “both for the

high salaries that these organisations offer and for the intellectual and ideological satisfaction

that the work provides”, despite offering insecure, temporary contracts and demanding long

working hours (Abdelrahman, 2007). This funding increased even further after the fall of

Mubarak. The Egyptian state frequently intervened, sometimes to repress, sometimes to

manipulate rivalries and sometimes to access funding. In the 2000s, Egypt and Cairo in

particular were characterized by increasingly open and frequent opposition to the government,

beginning with demonstrations in support of the second intifada in Palestine in late 2000,

followed by the election-monitoring movement Kefaya as well as increasing labour protests.

In January 2011 this culminated in the 18-day protests in Tahrir Square which caused

President Mubarak to step down. The period from the army’s announcement that power

would be handed over to a democratically elected government in January 2012, until the

renewed army take-over in July 2013, were characterized by an unprecedented flourishing of

all manner of activism. It was in this period, in May 2013, that we undertook interviews.

Since the military take-over in July 2013, there has been an increasing crackdown, first on

Islamist, but now also on secular activists.

Hence in many ways, the circumstances in the four cities could not be more different:

London’s established civil society, where both charities and street activism have a long

pedigree; Yerevan’s purpose-built but artificial civil society recently joined and challenged

by grassroots activism; Athens’ traditional civil society, where NGOs have made fewer

inroads, but street activism has become a mass phenomenon since the crisis; and Cairo’s

well-funded but volatile civil society, coming together in Tahrir Square in January 2011 to

overthrow a dictator but suffering from dissension and renewed repression since. Yet, as we

will show, there were important commonalities in the relations between activists and NGOs

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in all four cities. This suggests, first, that there is something universal about the dilemma’s

activists face in their encounter with material and coercive logics, and the ways they resolve

them; and second, that the cyclical nature of civil society’s engagement with state and market

is increasingly globalised, transcending local differences and circumstances.

We conducted field research in Athens together, developing a definitive interview

guide that we used in the other three other cities1. In each city we conducted semi-structured

interviews with twelve to twenty respondents, most of whom were activists in the sense

described above (square occupations or direct action), whilst some were journalists,

representatives of NGOs, trade unions or political parties. In this article, we focus solely on

the ‘activists’, although as we will make clear in the analysis, these categories also

sometimes overlapped. We selected the people we interviewed via a snowball sample, but

selecting for the greatest possible variety in political views, age, gender and class to reflect

the much-noted diversity in the street protests themselves. In Cairo for instance, we made

sure to interview various shades of liberals, leftists and Islamists, young and old, male and

female, English speakers and Arabic-only speakers. We did, however, focus on those deeply

involved, for whom activism, however they defined it themselves, is an important time

commitment and part of their identity, rather than on occasional demonstrators.

Our questions focused on the activists’ targets and aspirations; their tactics and

repertoires of action; the discourses and slogans; transnational links; and their relationship

with more formal civil society organizations, the subject of this article. The interviews

typically lasted between 60 – 90 minutes and were conducted in English or the local language.

All interviews were translated into English, transcribed and analyzed using NVivo software.

Since many of our questions were politically and/or organizationally sensitive, we have

anonymized the interviews and all respondents are referred to with pseudonyms or interview

1 1 We owe a great debt to Christina Psarra and MK (anonymised) for research assistance and translation in Athens and Cairo

respectively; to Irum S. Ali and Evelina Gyulkhandanyan for conducting some of the interviews in London and Yerevan respectively, and to Donna Middelkoop and Meta de Lange for transcription and anonymisation of the interviews.

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numbers.

While our analysis draws on our broader base of interviews, for the purposes of this

article, in order to provide greater depth and illustrate the identity and diversity of the

activists, we will focus on and take quotes from only four respondents in each city, each of

which was deeply involved in street activism and direct action in 2011-2012, and many of

whom continue to be so. Thus, we provided a window to the micro-level of their individual

trajectories and self-reflections, rather than have them speak as disembodied voices. At the

same time, we demonstrate that their views and considerations are also more broadly shared,

by regularly referring our broader base of interviews. The full transcripts of all our

interviews, in their anonymized form, are available online.2

In London, we will focus on Oscar, Charlie, Emily and Alice. Oscar, in his late 20s,

has been involved in Climate Camps, was active in Occupy London and now works on the

intersection between energy use and poverty; Charlie in his early 30s is an anti-austerity

activist and works full-time for an NGO; Emily, in her early 60s, has worked in the voluntary

sector for decades, but now sees herself as an independent activist, and was involved in

Occupy London; and Alice, in her early 30s, is an architect who camped at St. Paul’s for five

months and continues to engage in direct action.

In Yerevan, we will discuss the views and experiences of Davit, Narine, Milena and

Gayane. Davit, 30, works for a human rights NGO but is also deeply involved in civic

initiatives; Narine, late twenties, also works for an international NGO but is also an

environmental activist; Gayane and Milena are in their late thirties. Gayane, originally a

journalist with a Master’s degree from the US, now works for a human rights NGO and

helped to create a civic initiative which focuses on violence in the army. Milena is an

independent women’s rights activist and is involved in a number of civic initiatives.

2 We provide the full transcripts as a resource for other scholars and as part of our commitment to increasing transparency in the social sciences without compromising obligations towards respondents. The transcripts are to be found at http://www.lse.ac.uk/WEBSITE TO FOLLOW and http://www.uva.nl/DITTO.

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For Athens, we will draw on the interviews with Aiketerine, Eleni and Spiros, and

Vasilis. Aiketerine, late twenties, is a humanitarian NGO worker who has been involved in

many forms of street activism, in Syntagma Square, in the traditional anarchist Exarcheia

neighbourhood, and in various other locations. Eleni, early thirties, is a graphic designer who

had no previous activist experience when she became involved in Syntagma and Spiros is a

dock worker in his late forties. They worked together in anti-pollution protest in the port

suburb where they live, and are now engaged in direct action (reconnecting electricity

supplies) and food collection in the same area. We interviewed them together. Vasilis, late

thirties, has an anarchist background. He interrupted his academic career in the UK (teaching

and writing a PhD) in order to immerse himself in the Athenian Syntagma occupation, and

now runs an organization connecting and supporting solidarity initiatives, about which more

below.

For Cairo, we will focus on Mahmoud, Rania, Salma, and Malak. Mahmoud, early

twenties, is a law graduate who works for an NGO and comes from a ‘political family’,

meaning he has been involved in street demonstrations since his early teens. Rania, of the

same age, works for a human rights organization. Salma is an academic in her late forties

who did not engage in street activism until she became part of the ‘We are all Khaled Said’

Facebook group in 2010. Malak, mid-forties, is a veteran activist with a Marxist and anti-

globalisation background and a known connector between leftist and Islamist activists. He

has a corporate day job. All were in Tahrir square throughout the ‘eighteen days’ in 2011 that

led to the overthrow of Mubarak, except Rania, who was studying in the UK at the time, but

engaged in many forms of protest since returning in summer 2011.

Table 1 Our sixteen main respondents (at time of interview, Spring 2013) City Pseudonym Age,

gender Type of activism* Day job

Athens Aiketerina F late 20s

Anti-police violence; pro-democracy; anti-racism; anti-austerity & solidarity

Humanitarian NGO worker

Eleni F early 30s

Anti-pollution; pro-democracy; anti-austerity & solidarity; direct action

Graphic designer

14

Spiros M late 40s

Anti-pollution; pro-democracy; anti-austerity & solidarity; direct action

Teacher

Vasilis M late 30s

Anarchist; pro-democracy; anti-austerity & solidarity

Party-funded solidarity network

Cairo Mahmoud M early

20s Palestine solidarity; anti-police violence; pro-democracy; human rights

NGO worker

Malak M late 40s

Anti-globalisation; social justice; pro-democracy

ICT, corporate sector

Rania F early 20s

Human rights; social justice Human rights NGO

Salma F early 40s

Anti-police violence; pro-democracy; anti-GM foods; feminist

Academic

London Alice F early

30s Occupy; anti-austerity & solidarity Architect (on and off)

Charlie M early 30s

Anti-war; climate change; anti-austerity; anti-banks; direct action

Peace building NGO

Emily F early 60s

Voluntary action; citizen’s advice; anti-austerity

Own organisation

Oscar M late 20s

Climate change; anti-austerity Part-time job with activist network

Yerevan Davit M early

30s Human rights; pro-democracy; environmentalist; Occupy

Human rights NGO

Gayane F late 30s

Anti-military; pro-democracy; Occupy Human rights NGO

Milena F late 30s

Anti-death penalty; anti-military; feminist; LGBT; prison conditions

Musician

Narine F late 20s

Environmentalist; Occupy Good governance NGO

*First entry is type of activism first engaged in, others are more recent and current activities

3. THE CRITIQUE OF NGOS: “THIS IS A KIND OF CIVIL SOCIETY

BUSINESS”

Scholars studying NGOs in different parts of the world have examined how NGOs have come

to embrace the material and coercive logics of the market and state respectively. The

criticisms of NGOs, although all inter-related, can roughly be classed into three categories:

resource dependency, co-option by or constraints emanating from the state, and a general

pattern of de-radicalisation associated with institutionalization and a focus on service delivery.

The literature has argued that NGO dependence on foreign aid (Howell and Pearce,

15

2001, Hemment, 2012) as well as funding from national or local governments (Alcock and

Kendall, 2011, Lewis, 2005) leads to loss of independence and voice. On the ground, some of

our activist respondents held that many or most NGOs are just motivated by a desire to get

funding, to live well. Milena, herself a women’s rights activist, said,

“Women’s activism mainly started with grants. Mostly those grant-eaters … the

women, who were transferring some grants from Komsomol [Young Communist

League] to here [NGOs]. In reality they weren’t raising all the issues that existed.”

Mahmoud from Cairo similarly holds that

“Civil society has been misused. With endless amounts of money… a lot of people

just decided to stop working and stop doing anything positive for the society and they

just launched their civil society organizations. You see millions of funds and you see

basically nothing”.

In Athens, local anti-austerity activists Eleni and Spiros explained that “…no NGOs or the

Church were involved [in their actions], but we didn’t ask for their help either. But this

doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future. But it will be with real NGOs”. They were

implying that most NGOs are somehow ‘not real’ in terms of activist commitment (see also

interviews YN2, YN3, YN11, Yerevan; AN5, AN6, Athens on the pernicious effects of

funding, more particularly foreign funding, on NGOs). On the other hand, respondents we

interviewed, including sometimes the same ones who voiced these criticisms, like

Mahmoud, also reported suffering from the public’s general suspiciousness regarding

NGOs being foreign-funded (see also CN5, Cairo).

Academics have also examined how the growing participation of NGOs in service

delivery, and in particular through contracting arrangements, leads to a reorientation of

16

NGOs away from their values towards a focus on efficiency and effectiveness (Batley and

Rose, 2011, Robinson, 1997). This argument of a gradual drift of NGOs away from activist

commitments was also echoed by our respondents. In Yerevan, Narine said, “It seems to me

that the phase of NGOs has passed” indicating that NGOs, if indeed they ever did, no longer

played a leading role in campaigning and awareness-raising (see also interview Davit,

Yerevan; CN6, CN20, Cairo). But the constraining nature of institutionalization appears to

be especially felt in London (seeLN1, LN7, LN12, LN13).

Emily left her job in the voluntary sector and started her own initiative because

“…we found ourselves both at the national and local level, amongst people who were

paid professionals…we noticed an increasing professionalization and managerialisation.

There seemed to be a dulling of the fire and the motivation that we grew up with and we

started to wonder was this just the way we saw it, our corner of the world, or was there a

real problem going on here? Was this co-option of voluntary action?”

Radical left critics have argued that NGOs, are “powerful pacific weapons of the new world

order” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, 36) and that as part of the neoliberal aid regimes, NGOs

emphasize projects over movements thereby mobilising people to protest at the margins but

not to struggle against structural conditions that shape everyday lives (Petras, 1997, Lipschutz

and Rowe, 2005). We found this scathing critique echoed by Vasilis, the Athens activist who

also spent years living in the UK:

“In Greece you don’t have independent NGOs. It’s another way to destroy the social

solidarity systems, but including and importing the model of charities and NGOs.

This is a kind of civil society business … For us, the main antagonist is the civil

society – the NGOs”.

17

The nature of the denunciations made differs from context to context: Milena and Mahmoud

in Yerevan and Cairo refer to blatant greed in relation to funding, whereas Emily and Vasilis

in London and Athens describe a process of managerialisation and ‘business’. But both

strands fit within a broader and very widely shared perception that the engagement of NGOs

with the material logic, i.e. taking money, becomes a purpose in itself, dulling or even

destroying ideational motivations. Some, such as the activists quoted above as well as others

(e.g., LN12), contend that this can and does lead to the loss of independence of voice and

action. In London we discovered more adversarial stances between activists and NGOs than in

our other field sites. Some activists’ we interviewed (LN1 and LN7) are involved in groups

that have gone beyond criticising the actions of NGOs in private to publicly protesting NGO

policies and programmes. In one case, a group of activists even occupied the London

headquarters of a large NGO to protest the latter’s participation in a government funded

welfare-to-work programme (Boycott Workfare, 2013) . However, as we demonstrate in the

sections that follow, if we solely focus on these denunciations and the critical stances, we run

the risk of ignoring the broader, more complex set of interactions and below the radar

alliances which exist alongside and which we characterize as ‘surreptitious symbiosis’.

4. HOW NGOS SUPPORT ACTIVISTS: “THEY ARE LIKE A

RESOURCE CENTRE THAT ALWAYS EXISTS”

But while the comments made by Milena, Mahmoud, Emily and Vasilis and others in

Yerevan, Cairo, London and Athens are undoubtedly sincere, as well as being in alignment

with the near-total consensus in the NGO literature, they do not tell the whole story about

these activists’ relation to NGOs. As we will show in the next sections, the same activists turn

18

out to appreciate good relations with NGOs, and indeed rely on them to provide resources of

which the activists stand in need. What is more, quite a few actually work for NGOs, while

others are setting up initiatives with NGO-like characteristics.

Milena, the feminist activist from Yerevan who was quoted above as saying that NGOs are

grant-eaters who do not raise the really important issues, also describes them in a very

different way: “besides their everyday work, some NGOs also support with resources. They

are like a resource centre that always exist and are very useful in this means. They are very

important as a resource for mobilization”. These resources range from very practical ones like

printing facilities to resources flowing from a closer relationship with government. We will

focus on two types of resources that were most often mentioned by activists: the provision of

meeting space, and the provision of expertise, including substantive expertise, campaigning

know-how and legal aid.

Public space is a very important issue for contemporary activists. It is a symbolic

issue and an object of their struggles: the occupation of squares was in part intended as a

protest against the privatization of everything, reclaiming public space (e.g., Occupy

Mashtots, Occupy Gezi, etc.). What has received much less attention is that, in part because

of the same privatization processes, space is also very much a practical problem for activists.

They need spaces to meet and plan activities, as well as to carry them out. Public institutions

and even many NGOs nowadays no longer lend their spaces to public uses, but rent them out

at market prices, making it much harder to find meeting rooms.

Alice, as an Occupy London activist, attests that after the break-up of the camp, “in

terms of meeting space, it was a big problem when we lost the camp. So we mainly meet in

cafes”. Both in Athens (Interview Aiketerina, AN4, AN8, AN10) and in London (LN7,

LN11), recent movements have followed a longer tradition of squatting public buildings.

Squatting is done of course in order to make a political point, but it also provides a practical

19

solution to the problem of where to meet. In Cairo, the uprising also fostered initiatives that

required spaces, but rather than squatting, flats are converted to semi-public use either by a

private benefactor (Interview Salma), or by a group of people clubbing together to pay rent

and try to make a space self- sustainable (CN17, CN6 was part of the same initiative).

The other solution to the space problem is to turn to NGOs. Oscar from London,

echoing Milena above, says “things like resources, like they can print for us, they book a

room for us. So when you find a friendly NGO it’s quite a big thing”. In Oscar’s case, a

‘friendly NGO’ has actually provided him with a desk at their office. In Cairo before the

uprising, the ‘space’ provided by NGOs had both a practical and a more metaphorical

meaning. At the practical level, Abdelrahman records that before the uprising, the Anti-

Globalization Egypt Group (AGEG) “held informal, weekly meetings in a ‘borrowed’ space

in the Hisham Mubarak human rights NGO” (Abdelrahman, 2011, 412). But NGOs, more

specifically human rights NGOs, were not just a space, but a relative ‘safe space’ for activists

(See alsoCN7, CN8). Malak, who was himself also a member of AGEG, explains that

“I joined in the Egyptian organization of human rights … because it was the only

space that you could really criticize the government throughout 2000s … it was a

space that existed and the regime tolerated it in a sense, because it wasn't so

threatening and it was bad PR for the regime to really attack it … So we had that

space and this was the space we worked in up to the revolution. And actually it's still

the space that a large number of people are working through”.

This is also the case in Yerevan where in the context of growing government repression, it is

only the human rights NGOs that are providing support to activists (See YN9).

The second NGO resource that activists frequently referred to making use of was their

experience, expertise and contacts. In relation to advocacy, Davit from Yerevan held that

20

“NGOs brought new skills and abilities. And the existing activism nowadays is using

the tools developed by NGOs. If you look at the activism, those people, who have

been in NGO sector, work more professionally, than people who were out and joined

after. Maybe they are enthusiastic…but they do not have those skills.”

Alice, from Occupy London, referred in particular to the research capacity that NGOs

possess, more than independent activists. She said:

“As for the NGOs, there are those that we work very closely with such as [NAMES

DELETED]…they have specific structures, they have accumulated knowledge, they

can support us with things that we don’t have the time to dedicate to … I think they

have their own infrastructure so they are able to produce certain kind of material. We

can’t afford to have people doing research”.

Oscar refers more to resources flowing from the relationship with government:

“It’s all very informal and there’s obviously issues in terms of it’s difficult to get

[NAME DELETED] to sign off on supporting direct action because of the constraints

of being a big NGO. But they will support us in other ways. For instance, they’ll give

us embargoed reports so that we are aware of the policy stuff.”

21

Gayane’s fellow activist in Yerevan, YN8, refers in very similar terms to the utility of NGOs

for movement activists: “non-governmental organizations help a lot, which are carrying out

more institutional activities, where office work is shaped, where they collect all the

information and have legal services … Civic activists don't have enough income to deal with

those issues”.

In Cairo too, it is research, and more specifically the legal expertise of human rights

NGOs, that stands grassroots activists in good stead. Salma, herself a university-employed

social scientist, says

“I think the most important work is done by the human rights organizations … [those]

working on personal and civil liberties, political and civil rights, but also the groups

working on economic and social rights are doing fantastic work. So it's the rights

groups that stand out. Because also they do research, they do policy. They're

heavyweight in terms of the content of what they produce. They do a lot of

homework.”

Rania, who works for such an organization, describes concretely how the relationship might

work:

“We get invited by local committees in urban slums, in Cairo, telling us ‘we want you to

be with us, because we going to hold a press conference’…And then they would ask you

for information about what kind of rights do we really have, legally what can they do to

us?” (See also AN4, AN5in Athens; and CN8, CN15, on human rights NGOs in Cairo).

Apart from the near-universal reliance on meeting spaces, the types of resources that flow from

NGOs depend on the context. In Athens, where the sector is most weakly developed, we

22

actually see the least reliance on NGOs, although some respondents did refer to the legal

expertise of human rights NGOs, or material help with individual people in need. Respondents

in Cairo, London and Yerevan all refer to the research capacity and skills provided by NGO

staff. In London, Oscar and Charlie, added to that the benefit of close relations with policy

circles, whereas NGOs in the other three cities clearly do not have such intimate ties. In Cairo

and Yerevan, the – relative – safety provided by the international prestige and expertise of

human rights NGOs is particularly salient, whereas in London it is not. However, all the

concrete instances of resource transfers ultimately flow from NGO engagement either with the

material logic (providing meeting space, learnt skills, research capacity) or with the coercive

logic of the state (providing safety and information on imminent government policy). Thus, the

reliance on NGOs allows activists to indirectly benefit from NGO embedment in material and

coercive logics, without having to ‘pollute’ themselves by direct engagement with these

spheres.

5. WHY NGOS SUPPORT ACTIVISTS: “THEY ARE FREE” It is relatively easy to understand why activists, notwithstanding criticisms they may have of

NGOs, would be happy to rely on them for meeting space, printing services, research

expertise and legal aid. But it is not so obvious why these useful services are being rendered

to movement activists. From our interviews, we can discern three motivations for NGOs to

support activists. The first two concern the engagement of NGOs as organizational entities

with activists, whereas the third concerns individual NGO employees who support and

engage with activism in their personal capacity. We will argue that the latter is much more

common than the former, and that the relationship between NGO staff and activists goes

much deeper than the former occasionally booking a room or giving legal advice or a policy

document to activists.

23

The first motivation for supporting activism is a conception of NGO work that sees

this kind of support as part of their core business, and makes little or no distinction between

‘activism’ and ‘NGO work’. Salma’s discussion of human rights NGOs, quoted above,

demonstrates that she sees these organisations as being at the heart of Cairo activism. Rania,

who works for one of these organisations, initially shies away from the idea that she is an

activist:

“I would be labeled by others as an activist. I get mixed up and confused by the word

because of its generic use nowadays after the revolution. So everyone who walks

along in a demonstration becomes an activist? And then you start asking if everyone

is doing this professionally and this is really my career, do I call myself an activist?

So it's a very dazzling question but I don't go around calling myself an activist at all. I

say I work in human rights”.

Later in the same interview however, she recalls the term ‘activist’ in order to explain how

different her commitment to her work is to that of a mere ‘employee’:

“this is perhaps were the activist word comes, because many people in civil society or

in the different organizations that are part of the movement in Egypt, or the different

movements in Egypt, one of the things that they call themselves is activists, to

differentiate themselves from an employee who would be just taking orders and

following them through. And I think this is one of the ways in which the movements

themselves become more democratic from inside.”

A second line of reasoning defines the relationship between NGOs and activists in terms of

mutual benefits. Activists are seen as useful because of their ability to mobilise and get media

24

attention for issues that are also of concern to NGOs. Often NGOs, given their relationships

with states and donors and their reliance on those funding sources, are constrained in terms of

how vocal they can be in their criticisms of government or donor policies. At the same time

that closer relation to the state can also be useful to activists. Gayane explains, “When we

have a problem [as activists], we apply to NGOs, because they can be in touch with state

institutions. And when they have a need, we raise noise around the issue”. Oscar, an activist

from London describes a similar symbiosis, additionally explaining why the relationship

remains informal:

“We also go to this big civil society coalition called [NAME DELETED]. We’re not

formally signed up… We don’t want to be signed up to that and they don’t want us to

be signed up to that, but actually they probably quite like us to be there at meetings

because we probably get the media attention more than they do”.

However, our interviews suggest that in most cases, the support delivered by NGOs to

activists is neither a matter of NGO ‘core business’ nor of rationally defined mutual benefit.

Unlike Rania, many NGO staffers appear to feel that their work for the organization is not

entirely coterminous with their identity as an activist. It turns out that many others activists

who have day jobs in NGOs, described NGO work as constraining. While appreciating

having this for a ‘day job’, and the skills and contacts it has brought them, they argued that

there was a limit to what they could say and do as an NGO employee. We will focus here on

the reflections of Aiketerina in Athens, Mahmoud in Cairo, Narine and Gayane in Yerevan,

and Charlie in London, all of whom work for well-established NGOs.

Aiketerina in Athens make a strong distinction between institutional connections

between NGOs and activist movements, and her own personal commitments. On the one

hand she asserts that

25

“There is no connection between these movements and NGOs. Only in instances

where people from movements would refer people to NGOs or to a formal structure

so that the NGO could give them more assistance”.

On the other hand:

“I have participated in most of the riots, demonstrations and occupations of the past

few years. I wanted to see them from the inside, to see what they represent. But [in

2011] what was happening for the first time in Greece was that the older generation,

people like my mother went to protest and I also wanted to be a part of that.”

Mahmoud has a longer history as a street activist. Like Aiketerina he has been involved in

multiple movements rather than identifying with any particular one:

“I believe in protests and social movements … I love to be a member of different

kinds of movements raising particular awareness. I have been part of different

movements from spreading political awareness in Egypt and Cairo etc. That was

before and after the uprising. Also, I’ve been interested in politics since I was young

because my family is all political. My dad has been arrested tens of times, my uncle,

my mum …”

When he is asked whether he is an activist, his first reaction is to say yes because he engages

in other work beyond his work with the NGO: “As an activist? I dislike the term itself. I

would say yes. Because also next to my job I’m also a member of an association [NAME

WITHHELD] ”. He then redefines his current NGO work itself as a ‘different kind of

activism’:

“Now I’m an activist in a different sense, not protesting; I do protest but not really as I

26

used to do. But I’m doing something that affects the public interest. … I work on

different laws with the government and the parliament, the opposition and political

parties. This could be called activism.”

Gayane in Yerevan who works for a human rights NGO also begins by insisting that there are

‘different kinds of activism’, but she does not seem to believe that NGO work is one of the

kinds:

“There are so-called 'screamers'…unlike the professional NGOs, they raise problems,

and professional NGOs sit and work on projects. There are also [activists who are]

‘whistle blowers’, these are the ones who create communication and I probably

belong to those creating communication. I prefer to not only raise noise about the

issue, but also to link the issue’s beneficiaries or victims to relevant public

institutions.”

Narine, who works for an international NGO, also identifies with multiple movements

separate from her work:

“I do not separate the movements from one another. In a deep sense they are similar

to each other as all the raised issues of movements are the result of this system,

everybody has confronted with this [political] system”.

She initially appears to see her activism as connected to her NGO persona. Asked how she

became politically active, she says:

“Basically it was in an NGO, as [NAME WITHHELD] is very open for all active

citizens. It’s always helpful, supportive in various issues, and people here have the

27

same attitudes, they share the same values. While being in this network, I also became

that way.”

Nonetheless, in relation to an environmental campaign in which she is involved, Narine says:

“there are no NGOs involved in the issue of [NAME DELETED], there are representatives

from NGOs, but that is because of their own initiative” (see also YN12 on environmentalism;

YN9 on multiple movements identifying individual staff, but not NGOs, as organisations, as

involved in activism). She goes on to express frustration with NGOs, and a belief that

activists can actually be more effective than NGOs:

“[NGOs] are more in the role of supporter now, in the role of providing basic

information, scientific counseling…providing resources. They kind of were not able

to, did not seek to demonstrate activeness in the street. The fact showed that some

things are changed by young active citizens, who are more persistent, more mobile.

They are free from documentation, from writing grants, reports; they are free”.

In London, Charlie is also familiar with the phenomenon of NGO staff who are also activists:

“a lot of people involved in [anti-austerity network] themselves work in NGOs”. Just like

Davit quoted in the previous section, he sees great advantages to this background:

“They are all highly networked and knowledgeable about the political scene in the

UK. We all bring to it experience of having worked in these organizations. So not just

grassroots experience, but professional experience in NGOs as well. So we know both

sides of the fence!”

28

But for Charlie and his fellow activists, there clearly is a fence. In almost direct counterpoint

to Rania’s experience of her job, Charlie explains how for many members, the activist

network he is part of

“…is a way to get away from the world of NGOs as they can also go so far … it was

about using more radical means and having a more radical message, being more

autonomous than NGOs can be … NGOs pay you to work, but you start at be bottom

of the ladder and you do not have enough influence to make real change and make

your politics felt in the way you want to” (see also Oscar).

So, the reason NGOs support activists is because NGO staff are themselves activists. While

some, like Rania, see a complete continuum between their office job and other forms of

activism, most others engage in these other forms precisely because the NGO format does not

allow them to be politically active in all the ways that they want to be. It eases their discomfort

with the constraints of the material and the coercive logics, expressed in grant-writing and

working on projects, by giving them an additional means of political self-expression, without

giving up their jobs.

6. INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND DENIAL: “WE ARE NOT AN

ORGANIZATION”

Above we discussed the boundary crossings by NGO employees. Despite the useful benefits

drawn and the contacts, for many activists it was important to clearly distance themselves and

their activities from NGOs. Some of the respondents we spoke to who do not work for NGOs

went out of their way to emphasize that their activism was not NGO work, presumably

because they felt the term to have negative connotations. Yet, a few years on from the big

29

street demonstrations, it is clear that some are thinking about, or in fact acting on, the need to

consolidate their work, becoming more institutionalized in ways that resemble the trajectories

of NGOs.

Gayane, whose civic initiative is still entirely voluntary, suggests that it should

professionalise (see also YN2). The movement is now “in the stage to take it to the political

agenda”, but she is frustrated with the movement’s lack of professionalism and particularly,

their reluctance to embrace leadership. She said,

“A new kind of leader emerged in civic initiatives who are in favor of a more

horizontal management… they are collaborative and inclusive… almost everyone in

activists groups are leaders. The only problem is that they have a phobia from

leadership that it will make them similar to NGOs or political parties”.

Oscar from London is now “a paid worker for the group…because we had a massive problem

of capacity, because everyone had jobs. So we decided to get funding to pay someone to be

there for 3 days a week”. Yet Oscar, quoted a few times above on the relationship between

activists and NGOs, does not see himself as working for an NGO. Similarly, Emily claims

that,

“We are not an organization, though we have to have organizational arrangements for

more formal things like dealing with money where we have some and for ensuring

that we understand what is out there and we are not only speaking from opinion and

prejudice and our personal politics”.

Yet with four members of staff, albeit part-timers, there is little doubt that Emily’s is an

organization. A final interesting case is Vasilis, in Athens, who now works for an

30

organization funded by a left-wing political party, intended to support the blossoming of anti-

austerity initiatives in Greece, but who is very careful in his wording about how the

organization does this:

“First, we are working to make these solidarity movements more visible and to

support their informal networks and the networks between them. Because they face a

concrete need, sometimes people can’t see the larger picture. So we help them to see

where they fit into the whole process … We are also facilitating, but NOT

coordinating … This is not a top-down process”

This work description sounds eerily familiar to anyone familiar with development NGOs and

donors, who routinely deny having, top-down relations with their ‘partners’. Yet we have

quoted Vasilis above as a virulent opponent of NGOs, donors and everything they stood for.

More specifically, we found our respondents to be very uncomfortable with the financial side

of institutionalisation. Some go so far as to claim that money is unnecessary, others will take

it, or indeed give it, but insist on the lack of strings attached.

In London, Emily has found “this fantastic funder”, who accepted her plea that “we

don’t do performance indicators, we don’t do outcomes, we don’t know what’s going to

happen tomorrow let alone in a few months' time”. Still she emphasizes that “money isn’t the

issue”:

“Money cannot spark activism, though it can close it down or have a good try at

closing it down … I just had a conversation this morning with … a local umbrella

group who said “Oh we have no money, no core resources, where are we going to get

money, it’s such a problem” and I said to them that they were the first people in

31

months who talked to me about money because I had been living in the activist world

where money is not the point.”

Mahmoud in Cairo, who does earn a salary working for an NGO, and does not seem to have a

problem with that nonetheless claimed that “being active does not really necessitate money.

But civil society in Egypt here is really spending a lot of money paying a lot on the media.

Money and media they corrupt”. In Yerevan, Gayane sees an opposition between making

money and being an activist: in university she made “a final decision that being poor is not

scary to me, that you should not compromise yourself to adhere to the true values”. Yet like

in Cairo, in Yerevan NGO day jobs seem to provide a practical answer to the question of how

to be an activist and make a living too, for Davit, Gayane and Narine, whilst even Milena

who stays outside them relies heavily on NGO support for the funding of activities.

Vasilis is reluctant to admit that his organization actually funds grassroots initiatives:

“before the financial assistance, that we sometimes provide, we try to find in-kind donations,

especially for instance with medicines”. On the other side in Athens, Eleni and Spiros

explained that “(w)e want to remain autonomous. We don’t take funding from donors and we

are against funding. Even if some approaches us and wants to give us something, even if we

take it we won’t publicize them and their donations”.

Again, there are some contextual as well as individual differences here: while Gayane

craves professionalization, others in Yerevan, such as Milena, prefer the informal and radical

forms of activism. In London, whereas Emily decries it, her ‘fantastic funder’ who disregards

customary donor procedure might be met with more suspicion in Cairo; and Vasilis’ party-

funded initiative would look unsavory from a UK perspective. But they are united in their

unease with, indeed almost denial of, the fact that they are all taking or providing funding. The

awkward ways in which they describe their current situation reflects the tension between a

vision in which money pollutes activism, and a recognition that it may also be needed to sustain

32

it.

7. CONCLUSION: FUTURE SCENARIOS FOR SURREPTITIOUS SYMBIOSIS

Since 2011, there has been a global rise in street protests and occupations. We have

focused on Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan, but there have since been similar

outbursts in Delhi, Istanbul, Sao Paolo and Sofia. Media and academic coverage have

suggested that the protestors were ordinary citizens who had little or no connection with

formal civil society organisations. The activists themselves have emphasized their

commitment to internal democracy and their revulsion with ‘business as usual’

and ‘politics as usual’. Both in Western and non-Western settings, NGOs appeared to be

hopelessly disconnected from these upsurges of spontaneous citizen action. In answer to

our question first question, ‘how do today’s activists relate to NGOs’, we have revealed

an equally universal but more complex state of affairs: independent activists rely on

NGO resources in many ways, and NGO staff, especially junior but occasionally also

more senior staff, engage in street activism on the side. However, as we discussed,

activists continue to denounce and in some cases, openly oppose, NGOs that have

embraced the material and coercive logics of the market and state respectively. Yet

alongside the critiques and denunciations, there are also mutually-beneficial, albeit

‘below the radar’, interactions between NGOs and activists which we called surreptitious

symbiosis.

In answer to our second question, whether is it possible to do sustained activism

to bring about social change without becoming part of a ‘civil society industry’, we have

shown that currently, this is indeed possible, due to the phenomenon of surreptitious

symbiosis, but the question is whether this can be sustained in the longer term. The

current relationship between activists and NGOs, based on individual ties, is one which

33

both sides are typically keen to keep under the radar. It allows NGO staff to engage with

and support movements and activists and to feel as though they are making a difference

without having to make that relationship public. Given the growing competition for

funding and pressure from both governments and donors for NGOs to demonstrate their

professionalism and efficiency, being too close with movements that are radically

critical of governments could endanger NGOs contracting relationships or grant-based

support. This situation was also convenient for activists as it allowed them to present

themselves as entirely distinct from NGOs and for them to remain clean and

autonomous in their own eyes and those of others. But it remains to be seen whether

this ‘surreptitious symbiosis’ is a temporary or a lasting phenomenon. We sketch three,

not mutually exclusive, scenarios.

In the first, our cyclical logic would predict that those activists who have

continued to be active, a few years on from the peak of the movement, will, like Vasilis,

Emily or Gayane, increasingly seek new ways to fund or be funded, and to (re-)engage

with the state and its policies. Both of these processes are occurring. For example,

several activists (Oscar and LN1) in London have received funding from a newly

established radical grant making body, which supports grassroots groups without

demanding the same type of accounting, monitoring and reporting required by

traditional donors thus allowing activists to obtain small amounts of money for their

projects without having to dramatically alter the way they operate. This allows them

to claim that they remain clear of the taint of professionalization and managerialism.

As for (re-)engaging with the state and its policies, some activists have joined

political parties (Gayane, YN2, YN11, and at the time of interviewing, CN7, CN8,

CN10, CN12, CN13, CN15, CN16, CN20) or attended political party conferences

(LN1) while others have been elected to serve in local government (Spiros). This

growing engagement with the material and coercive logics are driven by the need to

34

scale-up their efforts and to widen impact. They are evidence of a more sustained

engagement with the material and the coercive logics, but these forms of

institutionalization are perceived by the activists as different from NGOs, just as NGOs

are different from the trade unions or political parties who used to be much more

prominent actors in civil society.

Our second scenario focuses on the emancipatory potential of the NGO staff that

have immersed themselves in recent activism, personified in our article by Aiketerina, Davit

and Milena, Charlie, or Rania. Combined with pressure from outside on NGOs to prove

their continued relevance, they may come to rejuvenate and re-radicalize NGOs from within,

challenging cosy relations with donors and the state and emphasizing reconnection with

grassroots activism. This is an optimistic scenario which would require not only the

participation of individual (junior) staff, but also shifts in NGO leadership and organizational

culture which may be difficult to achieve. In this scenario the symbiosis, re-asserting the

primacy of the ideational logic in global civil society, would become more sustained and lose

its surreptitious character.

Finally, in the third scenario, if NGOs cannot be rejuvenated and re-radicalized from

within, then the opposition between activist groups and NGOs may grow. It is clear that the

future of NGOs is under threat: after a decade of virulent criticism, distrusted by

governments and the general public alike, in a hostile financial climate,

they may have outlived their purpose, and wither and die or become hybrid organisations

such as social businesses. While for some activists this would be a vindication, the

demise of NGOs could also have an unexpected indirect impact on the more radical

activism that has sought to distance itself from the lure of money and jobs, but has

surreptitiously also relied on it. In other words, despite activists’ criticism and their

uneasy relationship with NGOs, the demise of the latter would be the loss of an ally

nonetheless.

35

It remains to be seen how these processes will develop in each of the four contexts,

and whether the move towards institutionalization we are beginning to witness,

three years on from the movements in the squares, can – as the activists themselves insist -

be distinct from patterns of NGO institutionalization, continuing to privilege and

emphasize the ideational logic.

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